Consumer Reports Rates Surgical Centers

Have you ever consulted Consumer Reports before buying a new appliance or car? I have. Now you can pick up the latest issue (September 7, 2010) and decide where, among the 221 centers that participated, you'd like to have your coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery performed.

Rick opines in the podcast (and btw, also agrees with the editorialists in the New England Journal of Medicine) that this is a seminal event in medicine, and that the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) deserves kudos for compiling and crunching this data. The story is this: beginning in 1989 the STS began to gather data on many aspects of cardiac surgery, including coexisting medical conditions in their patients, rates of death, use of medications, complications, and surgical techniques. They analyzed and refined their methods with the objective of improving the standard of care for all concerned. Wow! That's what medicine is supposed to do!

Now Consumer Reports has compiled a rating system using stars that depends on 11 of these performance measures. One, two or three stars are awarded depending on these factors. Actual scores on four of the subcategories can also been seen.

What's good about this? I think it helps patients become more informed, and therefore better at participating in decisions related to their own medical care. Rick believes the real benefit lies in allowing standards against which all programs can be measured to be developed and assessed. For programs that fall short it provides a benchmark for improvement.

One concern is that critics may say we don't have physician or surgeon-specific scores and can't compare individuals, but Rick points out that early attempts to rate physicians in this way had the undesirable result of causing them to refuse difficult cases in order to avoid compromising their scores. Program wide ratings may largely avoid this problem.

The STS program and willingness to reveal data to a large consumer magazine provides new transparency in medicine that will hopefully encourage adoption of such methods in many more medical arenas.

Johns Hopkins Medicine does not necessarily endorse, nor does Johns Hopkins Medicine edit or control, the content of posted comments by third parties on this website. However, Johns Hopkins Medicine reserves the right to remove any such postings that come to the attention of Johns Hopkins Medicine which are deemed to contain objectionable or inappropriate content.

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About this Blog

This blog gives additional details on one of multiple topics in PodMed, a weekly podcast found at Hopkinsmedicine.org/ podmed. It looks at the top medical stories of the week for people who want to become informed participants in their own health care.

PodMed is created by Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Rick Lange M.D., professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and vice chairman of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

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Disclaimer

Johns Hopkins Medicine does not necessarily endorse, nor does Johns Hopkins Medicine edit or control, the content of posted comments by third parties on this website. However, Johns Hopkins Medicine reserves the right to remove any such postings that come to the attention of Johns Hopkins Medicine which are deemed to contain objectionable or inappropriate content.